Until Dawn
by Illusive Writings
Summary: Entry for the Castle Halloween Bash of 2016. A case forces the team to relocate to a remote location in the mountains to investigate the death of a mass murder survivor. Between legends, curses, a haunted sanatorium and a bloodthirsty serial killer, they have to choose wisely their next move, if they want to save their skin. Rating may be subject to a change.
1. Chapter 1

_My entry for the Castle Halloween Bash of 2016. Partially inspired by the 2015 videogame Until Dawn by Supermassive Games, starring Hayden Panettiere, Brett Dalton, Rami Malek and more (really, they did the voice acting and the motion capture, check it out, it's crazy!). It's an 80s slasher style videogame, sort of a choose-your-own-adventure type of game revolving around the Butterfly Effect theory of every single choice having a distinct effect in our life. Perfect game to play at Halloween (my husband and I did it last year, spent Halloween playing it and it was amazing, until we both grew too tired and started missing all the QTEs and nearly all the characters died). I'll try to keep it short and have it done by Halloween._

 _Unbetaed, all mistakes are mine and mine alone. I'm trying to give Alex, my awesome beta reader, more time to catch up with Sins Of The Father and Shadows (yes, Shadows is back on track, almost) as I wrote more chapters than she could actually go through. Set around Halloween in Season 5, right after Probable Cause._

 _All rights belong to Andrew Marlowe, ABC Studios, Supermassive Games and SONY._

* * *

"Come on Castle, the boys are already there!"

Rick hobbled down the unpaved road in a secluded part of North Central Park, skipping the pools of muddy, stagnant water that remained from the storm that had raged during the night. It was a crisp, late October morning and they were heading to the latest crime scene, and of course he had decided to wear some expensive leather shoes, totally useless in those conditions.

"You could have told me the scene was in the middle of Central Park!" he cried, trying to keep the soil off himself.

Beckett stopped and looked at him, with a loud sigh of resignation. "Castle, it's nearly November and last night it poured. Half of New York is covered in either mud or watered down trash. You should have realized yourself those shoes weren't the right ones to wear. I have boots myself!"

He groaned and finally reached her. "Good point. I guess getting interrupted in the middle of some hot early morning make out sessions dulls my observation abilities. I'll pay better attention next time."

"You say that every single time. Come on now, it should be close enough now."

A few steps ahead a uniform waved at them so they could move in the right direction. He showed them a secluded path in the trees at the side of the road that led to a clearing. The whole area was closed off with bright yellow police tape and surveilled by more officers wrapped up in their heavy winter uniforms. Autumn that year had decided to be colder than the usual and Beckett found herself wrapping her hands together to ward off the chill of the early morning as Ryan gestured them to come closer.

A woman in her early twenties or late teens lay on the wet grass on her side, her knees pulled up to her chest and her arms circling her knees as if to protect herself. She was covered in cuts and the parts of her face not covered by her hands were marred by dark welts, as if she had been beaten before she had tried to escape through the park. Her blonde hair was matted and full of twigs and fallen leaves, while her clothes were covered in mud and dirt.

"What do we have here?" she asked, kneeling beside Lanie, as the medical examiner took notes about the body in front of her.

"Meet Samantha Moore, age 20, resident in Seattle, Washington. Was found this morning by a dog walker when the good doggie shoot down the road and started barking. He reported to 911 around six thirty, first response came roughly five minutes later," said Ryan. "There's a hotel keycard in her wallet and all her personal belongings are still on the body. Cash, credit cards, documents, everything is here."

"Doesn't look like a mugging then. Signs on the body?"

"Except for the dirt and the visible bruises, she doesn't look like she was harmed. There are no gunshot or stab wounds visible anywhere, no bloodstains or anything that would point to a violent death, but I will know more after I examine the body. She has a bump behind her head, probably caused by blunt force trauma, but except for that, she looks in pristine condition, given the circumstances," explained Lanie.

"If you had to take a wild guess, would you say the bump is the cause of death?" asked Castle from behind them. Beckett turned to take a look at him as he stood a few steps away from them, his hands planted in his pockets, seemingly lost in deep thoughts.

Lanie shrugged. "Could be. Could also be internal bleeding from wounds covered by her clothes, I don't know. It doesn't really look like she died of natural causes or of suicide, at the moment."

He gave them a stiff nod, but said nothing else.

"Castle, what's going on your mind?" asked Beckett, as she noticed there was something deeply wrong in him. He was never that silent on a crime scene, nor he looked so worried.

He sighed. "I don't know… the name rings a bell. Can I see the face?"

Lanie took a picture before moving the hands off the face.

They all gasped when they saw the expression of utter terror permanently stamped by death on the girl's face. She looked like she had seen Death incarnate, like she had been terrified when she had died, and the cold and rigor mortis had fixed her last moment of terror forever on her face. The bawling, empty eyes, the mouth slightly open in a grimace of fear and the copious, congealed blood that had been dripping from her mouth painted the perfect picture of horror.

"I've never seen anything like this before!" stated Lanie as she hurried to take another picture. "I know that extreme effort and adrenaline, along with the cold can set off rigor mortis right away but… this is incredible!"

"And terrifying," added Ryan, slightly uneasy.

Beckett swallowed a hard lump that had formed in her throat. The case that had started like a random murder of a tourist was taking a strange turn, she could almost feel it, the weirdness of that case already creeping up her back and making her feel awkward and unsettled.

"You really don't remember her?" asked Castle then.

Everyone around them turned to look at him with inquisitive stares and glares. "No," replied Beckett as she stood up. "Why?"

"About two years ago she was found wandering in the woods in Western Canada during a snowstorm, delirious with hypothermia and fear. She claimed a serial killer was hunting her down and had killed all her friends back at the cabin she had been staying. Sort of a slasher movie kind of thing, police wouldn't even investigate until she became hysterics and almost forced them to go and check the cabin. They found six corpses, murdered in the bloodiest ways you can imagine. They were staying at a famous horror movie director's mountain lodge, his son among the group. He was missing and was reported dead given the extreme weather conditions outside. They never found the body."

Esposito, who had been occupied with taking statements up until then, walked closer. "And you know that how?"

"You know, I get bored easily and I go look for weird facts and news from time to time. This one creeped the hell out of me, I have to admit it," he explained briefly.

"You're saying she survived a massacre only to die two years later in Central Park?" inquired Kate. "I doubt that can be a coincidence."

Castle nodded, warily, as Ryan and Esposito exchanged a worried look. "Should we look for the report of that case while we investigate on this front too?" asked Ryan.

Kate nodded. "It wouldn't hurt. It's too strange, the only survivor of a mass murder suddenly dies and looks like she's scared to death? Maybe Castle's been rubbing some of his crazy theories on me, but I don't think this is a coincidence. Castle and I are going to check at the hotel, see if someone else was with her or if she had visitors. Espo, Ryan, you two handle the canvassing and the statements, I'll call Gates and ask her if she can call police in Canada and get the report, that should speed things up. See you later at the precinct."

She snapped a picture of her driving licence and another of the hotel keycard to show, before hurrying back to the main path and to the car.

"This is weird," snapped Castle after they had climbed into the cruiser.

Beckett started the engine and nodded. "Yes. I don't know if it's you, incoming Halloween or the case itself, but when I saw her face… and then when you told us… she looked like she had seen a ghost or something!"

"Think she might have died of actual fear?" he inquired, his fingers tapping an erratic rhythm on his knee as he maneuvered the car in the thick Manhattan traffic.

"Is it even possible?" He nodded. "Let's wait until Lanie has something to tell us. I don't really want to jump to conclusions, we might even find out that it's just a bunch of coincidences. Let's see what we can find at the hotel. Oh and let me call Gates, to see if she can get things going with Canada."

 **XXX**

The doormen, after Beckett had showed him the badge and explained the situation, seemed extremely willing to cooperate. He was an elderly man, probably approaching eighty years old, and he seemed genuinely upset by Samantha Moore's death. As he led them to her room, he kept shaking his head and muttering things to himself, about how the world was turning into a living hell, how a girl wasn't even allowed to take a walk in the park without being harassed or worse and things like that.

"She seemed like a nice girl, you know? Polite, quiet… she's been here for a couple of weeks, I assumed she was looking for a more stable place to live in, I don't know."

"Did anyone come to visit her?" asked Kate.

The man passed the passepartout in the electric keylock and the red led turned green as it opened. "No one. She received some mail while here, a couple of big envelopes I supposed were books and the like. She paid for a month in advance, so I didn't bother much, but she had no visitor," he explained, his voice faltering.

"Thank you Mr. Roberts, we appreciate your help. We'll take a look around now if you don't mind."

The man nodded. "No, not at all. Do whatever it takes to get the villain that killed her! Poor Sam, she was such a good girl…" he repeated.

Beckett nodded, understanding, and fished a card from her wallet. "Please call me if you rember something. Anything could be important."

He accepted the small card and inspected it through the thick glasses. "Will do, Detective Beckett. I'll ask my son if he noticed anything suspicious too, he took my place downstairs for a couple of hours last week, when I had to fix a couple of plumbing issues upstairs."

With that, he walked back down the hallway to the elevator, limping slightly. Castle looked at her. "What are the odds that our killer decided to pay a visit to Samantha right in those two hours Mr. Roberts wasn't present?"

"Little to none." They both wore nitrile gloves so they wouldn't leave fingerprints around and she opened the door.

Inside, the room looked pristine. The bed was made, the small desk beneath the window was spotless, only a neat pile of files and books stationed there, right in front of a worn chair. Beckett immediately checked the small wardrobe and found absolutely nothing outside the ordinary, then moved to the bed. The table had a small drawer and she pulled it open. Inside, she found a Bible, probably untouched, a small satchel containing a number of over-the-counter medicines like a travel-size bottle of Tylenol, antihistamine, Aspirin and half used tube of ointment made to treat allergic reactions.

"Looks like she was prone to allergy," she commented, putting down the satchel. She found second one, bigger this time and found it also contained drugs, but the strictly prescription ones. "And she was also being cured for depression."

That piqued his interest. "Really?"

She nodded. "Yes. Prozac, Adderal… she's got a small drugstore in here." She checked the label and then counted the pills in the containers. "She also looked like she took them religiously, these were all filled three weeks ago, it's a month supply and there are the correct number of pills in them. She looked like she was taking care of herself."

"She was also into First Nations history and mythology," he commented, lifting one of the books he was examining on the desk. " _Native American Myths And Legends_ by John Malick." He flipped the pages and found a bookmark. "She also marked the chapter regarding the Wendigos."

"I assume you know what you're talking about."

He nodded, murmuring something. "They're creatures born of cannibalistic rituals, or so I remember. I've read stuff too, but not this book. If I remember correctly, the Wendigo is a monstrous creature that generates from men and women that have consumed human flesh. They would turn into lanky, blind creatures with long limbs and sharp teeth, always hungry for more human meat."

She joined him at the desk. "Creepy interests for a twenty years old girl." She took a file and opened it. There was a map of a mountain, with landmarks scribbled on with uncertain hand. _Cabin_ , _Cableway_ , _Sanatorium_ were marked in red pen, while other ones were written in black. A blue jagged line seemed to mark a road or a path that linked all the locations. "Was she investigating on the massacre?"

Castle shrugged. "Wouldn't you, if you were the only to survive?"

Beckett groaned. "Touchè. It's just… we're so far away, you said it happened in the mountains of Western Canada, and she was from Seattle, what was she doing here?"

"Mr. Roberts said she received some mail, maybe she had contacted an expert in this stuff? You know, with the universities here, there's a chance you can find an expert of Native American myths here."

"Good point, let's look for that mail."

They did find some torn envelopes of various sizes in the trash bin in the small bathroom. Unfortunately, there was no sender address written on them. "Back at square one," she murmured.

"Not really." As usual, Castle had his smartphone in his hands. "There's an anthropology professor at Hudson University that appears to be an authority on the subject in question. Want to call him?"

 **XXX**

While Beckett was on the phone with the professor at Hudson University, Castle received a call himself, from Lanie.

"Castle, where's Kate? I can't seem to reach her."

"She's on the phone at the moment. You got something for us?"

"Not really, I just got at the morgue, I just wanted to tell you that I found her phone in an inner pocket of her jacket and I took the liberty to notify her parents. They'll fly in as soon as they can catch a flight."

Castle nodded. "I'll make sure to tell Kate. Found anything else?"

Lanie sighed on the other side of the line. "Not really. A bunch of crumpled paper in her pockets, a ticket for a Broadway musical that took place a couple of nights ago… not much to be honest, but I'll leave the detective work to you. I'm going to take some x-rays of the body now the proceed with the autopsy. I'll let you know when I'm done."

By the time Lanie hung up, Kate had finished talking to the professor. "Learned anything?" he asked.

She shook her head. "Not really, he only confirmed she had asked him some notions about Wendigos and he provided some material, after she had told him about the massacre. Was that Lanie?"

"Yes, he found her phone and called her family. Her parents are flying in."

Beckett sighed. "I really hope Espo and Ryan have something to work on, because we have nothing to work on here!"

Castle reached out for her hand and pulled her into a hug. They had just come off a very strenuous case that had involved all of them on a personal level and the weariness from that still had to wore off. In fact, he himself had been framed by Jerry Tyson, in a wayward vendetta for figuring out who he was, two years prior. And now this case looked impossible right from the start, not to mention it was incredibly sad that a girl, lucky enough to survive a massacre in which all her friends had died, had to die like that. Castle felt the pang of sadness tightening in his chest, as he thought his own daughter wasn't too younger than Sam, and now two parents had to grieve the death of their child.

"Hey, was there any case we weren't able to solve? Come on, we can make it. And after that, we're going to have the best Halloween party ever, alright? Why don't you call CSU so they can come and do their thing here, and we grab some real breakfast? We can get some for Espo and Ryan too, if you want."

Beckett smiled, briefly. "Sounds like a good idea. Lead the way then."


	2. Chapter 2

The moment the doors of the elevator slipped open, they noticed Captain Gates stationed beside Beckett's desk, observing the murderboard the boys had already set up. She looked deeply absorbed in its contents and startled a bit when they reached her.

"Oh, Detective, Mr. Castle, good to see you here. Detective Ryan informed me you were going to search the victim's hotel room. Found anything interesting?"

"Only that she was investigating the mass murder she escaped two years ago," she explained. "She had contacted an anthropology professor at Hudson University about myths and legends of Native Americans that inhabited that area of Canada where the massacre took place. Apparently, while searching for clues she must have stumbled on the local legends about monsters that would haunt the area."

Gates nodded. "Was she grasping at straws looking for answers?"

"We've found she was taking medications for depression and she was very careful with them. I feel confident enough to say she wasn't suicidal, although we only made a cursory exploration of her room and we didn't look too deep, we didn't even find a computer now that I think of it. CSU is going through her belongings at the moment and Doctor Parish is doing the autopsy. We're currently waiting for both forensic evidence to start investigating, because right now, we don't have much."

"What about the professor she contacted?"

"Spoke to him already. He claims they never met in person but they spoke for about half an hour a week ago, and after that he sent her some documents that he believed with help her with her research. He's an elderly professor in his seventies, we doubt he can be our culprit."

Another nod from Gates. "I see. I've got hold with our colleagues in Canada and they have agreed to send over the whole report in digital format, complete with pictures and a video of Samantha Moore's interrogation. I spoke to the investigator in charge of the case and he sounded in distress, when I spoke about the case. It made national headlines there, though only local here. They were under a lot of pressure to solve the case but they never managed to."

Beckett nodded and booted her computer. "I really hope we get enough evidence to build a case here then," she said, glancing behind the Captain at the murderboard, still mostly empty. "We don't have much to work for now."

"Make it count then, Detective. I've been informed by Doctor Parish she already contacted the family. They should be flying here by evening, maybe they will know why she was so far away from home, investigating a murder she barely survive."

"Yes Sir. I was counting on that."

As the Captain walked back to her office and shut the door behind her, Beckett let out a long breath. "Now I wonder what the hell happened in Canada."

She found an email, forwarded from Captain Gates' address, and she opened it. It came with a large attachment and she opened it. There was a hundred pages long PDF containing all the reports for the massacre Sam had survived to, an archive with all the photos taken there and a video. Beckett went straight for the report and quickly went through the first few pages, where the detectives in charge had written down their first impressions of the case.

Words like _bloodbath, massacre, beheading, amputation_ stuck out like neon signs. Apparently, six people had died that day, all people in their early twenties, all part of the same group of friends. According to Samantha's statement, they had gathered there to go skiing after a couple of years forfeiting their annual skiing vacation.

"Why did they skip two years in a row?" asked Castle.

Beckett flipped through the digital pages on the screen with a few quick clicks on the mouse. "Looks like two of their friends had disappeared up there, when they were sixteen. They went hiking together, got separated in two groups and while the first group came home unscathed, two girls… wait, the younger twin daughters of the owner of the lodge, had disappeared."

Castle jolted on the chair. "And the owner of said lodge is?"

"No idea," she said shaking her head as she scoured through the report to find the name of the owner. "Oh wait, there it is. Bob Washington."

"No way, _the_ Bob Washington? The director of _Bitter Feast_? I had no idea! It wasn't reported on the news I read about the murder!"

"Maybe they wanted to keep it quiet. You know, famous director of horror movies, a mass murder takes place in his house? People would start thinking something is very wrong with him."

Castle nodded. "Now I see why he has completely stopped making movies. Up until five years ago, he'd make at least one movie per year, producing countless others. And they were all good! That guy was a genius of the genre!"

"Well, I guess losing all your children in the span of a couple of years can make you want to stop making movies. His eldest son, Josh, wasn't among the dead but was never found. Police have supposed he tried to escape the massacre and got lost in the forest in the snowstorm." She took a deep breath. "Damn, this case sucks."

"Kate, what if the cases are not connected?" he proposed. "What if Samantha simply walked in the wrong place at the wrong time and this happened?"

She threw him an inquisitive look. "Where does this even come from? For once, I'm considering the idea that two cases apparently so far apart are indeed connected and you're the one to pull back? Are you alright?"

He sighed. "Not really. For a moment I thought of Alexis when we found the body. She's going to college now, she has new friends and… that thing in the mountain cabin could easily happen in the Hamptons. And Alexis has friends there. It got me thinking, just that."

"I see. It's scary, really. But it can't really be a coincidence that Samantha Moore escaped a mass murder and died not two full years later. While investigating on the case." She turned again to the file and scrolled down the file. "Look at this, there's a not from the ME in his final report about all the bodies: _...those whose facial features weren't rendered unrecognizable by the brutality of the wounds had a terrified expression on their faces, as if they had been terrorized by something or someone right before being murdered_. It fits all too well, Castle."

"Serial killer then?" he proposed.

She leaned back on the chair. "Looks like it."

XXX

They spent the rest of the morning making more phone calls and checking every activity Samantha may have done during her stay in New York. Her credit card balance showed she ate regularly at a diner not too far from the hotel, had coffee every morning at Starbucks and such. She called her parents every night at the same time and rarely went out, or at least her bank account didn't show any purchases at night. It seemed like she had gone out at night only three days before her murder, to see a musical in Broadway. Lanie had already found the ticket stub in her coat pocket.

"You'd think that even if she was here with a purpose, she'd go and do some sightseeing, right?" said Castle as he observed the list of her purchases with her credit card.

"Maybe she did, but we don't know. Maybe she had a friend here, someone she'd go out with. We'll have to ask her parents, when they come in."

Beckett's phone shrieked in her pocket. "Beckett?" she answered. "Oh Lanie, yes… alright, we'll come down. Give me a moment to update Gates and we'll be there."

They arrived at the morgue a while later, dodging the traffic through strategic use of different routes. Beckett preceded him as they walked through the double door and he saw her shivering when they were hit with the lower than average temperature in the exam room. "What do you have for us?"

"Some good news, some bad news. Good news, there's a distinct pattern on the bruise in the back of the head where she was hit. In case you find the murder weapon, we can identify it with that. It's some sort of heavy stick that left a sort of tally kind of mark on her skin. She bled a little from there, so there's probably blood on it too," explained the ME. She walked to the luminous board and stuck three different x-ray prints and showed them the spot she had been hit from three different angles. "See here? The blow was hard, but not hard enough to kill her or incapacitate her. She was still able to run a good distance before she probably felt dizzy and had to stop."

"In the clearing?" asked Kate.

Lanie shook her head. "No. She was dragged there. There are drag marks on the back of her shoes and her jeans. Someone held her beneath her arms and dragged her in the clearing. Someone that wasn't much taller than her."

"So we're looking for someone around five foot seven?"

"Exactly."

"And the bad news?" asked Castle.

"She died of a heart attack."

The blunt response left them quite astounded. "She died of a heart attack at twenty years old?" Beckett seemed uncertain. "Wasn't she a little too young for that?"

"Not if something helped her. Her blood work came back a little after I opened her up and there were insanely high levels of potassium in her blood. Which causes heart failure. So I went looking for possible causes in her organs, like kidney failure, but I found nothing. Then I looked on her skin and beneath what looked a scratch mark on her neck, I found a puncture. She was injected potassium in excess, and that caused the heart attack."

"And the terrified face?"

"I fear it's just a byproduct of quick onset of rigor mortis. She was chased through Central Park for a long while, hit in the head, dragged off the road and such. If the murdered stayed to watch as she died, she would have been terrified. The sudden circumstances of her death, plus the physical exertion of the chase quickened the rigor mortis and…"

As the two women spoke of the scientific reasons behind such a peculiar thing, Castle roamed around the room and found Samantha's personal belongings neatly arranged in a box, catalogued as evidence and placed in clear plastic bags, like procedure demanded.

Careful not to disrupt Lanie's order - she was maniacal about keeping things neat at all times - he looked through them. An iPhone with a bright pink cover, slightly scratched, the ticket stub of the Broadway show she had attended, some receipts, crumpled, and a worn out wallet. The normal contents of a person's pockets. Beneath the wallet, its contents lay in single, smaller plastic bags. Again, nothing out of the ordinary: some bills, a couple of credit cards, a small stack of personal cards, her ID and driving license, absolutely nothing really interesting, except for a piece of paper, torn from the corner of a larger sheet, with a QR code printed on it.

Curious, Castle picked it up and twisted it around. On the other side there was nothing, not even a mark. The torn sheet was in pristine condition, printed on rather thick, high quality paper. The fibers were visible where the piece had been torn from the original, larger sheet and he chuckled, wondering what kind of idiot uses a full piece of paper to print such a small thing. Out of boredom, he picked his phone and scanned it, just to see what was so important to be printed on that kind of paper and to be conserved so well in her wallet.

The code brought him to a video on YouTube. It was flagged as private, that meant one could watch it only if a direct link had been shared with a person. He thought of some sort of prank someone had pulled, or maybe a ad campaign for something meant for millennials, he had no idea, so he pressed play, ready to find a well made ad video for a new perfume or a new TV show or webseries.

The video started dark, nearly black. On the small screen of his own iPhone, he could see some shadows in the background, but nothing definite. Until a single, naked lightbulb came to life and swayed above an empty chair, which didn't remained empty for long, as a person in dirty blue overalls walked in and sat on the chair. He wore a mask on his face, a strange mash up of a demonic clown and a skeleton. It was creepy as fuck.

"Uh, girls, I think you should really see this!" he called, pausing the video and walking towards them.

"See what?" asked Lanie.

He showed them the piece of paper in the plastic bag. "This. I scanned this QR code, I was curious, and this strange video appeared. Look at that!"

He tapped the screen again and the video reprised. The masked person stared at the camera, hands on his knees, immobile. Then a seemingly disembodied voice spoke.

"If you arrived to this video then you're a better investigator than I have expected," spoke the voice, heavily distorted to be unrecognizable. "And since you found this video, then you must be trying to figure out what happened to Samantha Moore. That means you're looking for me."

Beckett tapped on the screen and stopped the video. "What the hell is going on?"

"I think your killer is taunting you," replied Lanie. "In quite a dramatic way, I might add."

She tapped again and the video reprised. "I'll waiting for you where everything began four years ago. Where Beth and Hannah met their demise. Where Samantha escaped the divine justice I was there to bestow on her and all those other selfish idiots that came with her. You have a week to find me. Then I'll be gone for good."

The video cut like that, with nothing else, not even a fade to black.

Castle and Beckett exchanged a worried look. "You think Gates would allow us to take this case all the way to Western Canada?" he asked.

She sighed. "She may even let us, what worries me is the Canadian Police. Will they let us investigate?"


	3. Chapter 3

Truth be told, they'd never expect that Gates would have pulled so many strings and sound so angry when she pushed, poked and prodded with the Canadian police in order to allow the whole squad to fly to the Washington's cabin and look for the killer. The moment they had showed her the video, she had decided they had to get there, one way or another.

It was actually the video that did the trick with the Canadians too. All they could say, after they sent the link, was that they were welcome to fly there and stay as long as they wanted, as long they brought warm clothes.

In less than twelve hours they found themselves flying to the other side of the continent, in another state, with full approval by both the NYPD and the Canadian police to investigate. They had little time to pack and buy some supplies. Castle overdid it, as usual, and bought so much supplies they could have easily survived a whole week up in the mountains. When questioned about why he bought so many things, be it dried food or survival knick knack he could find in the only specialized shop in New York he simply shrugged his shoulders. "You never know, right? The local police says will be all alone in a place with no electricity except for old diesel generators, I just like to be prepared!"

At the airport, they were picked up by a couple of local cops in uniform. They escorted them to a police minivan and then drove, mostly in complete silence, to a police station a couple of towns away from the airport. There, they were introduced to a thirty-something detective, who apparently was in charge of both investigations, the one on the disappearance of Hannah and Beth Washington and then the massacre, Detective Luisa Sanders.

"Welcome to Canada, Detectives. Hope the flight was a quiet one."

Ryan shrugged. "Normal, a couple of turbulences, nothing to be worried about."

"Right. Now, I assume you want to know everything we know about this case, don't you?" They all nodded. "Well, I'm afraid I have to tell you that we don't know squat."

"How's that even possible? Six people died and four disappeared!" inquired Castle.

Detective Sanders shrugged her shoulders. "It's not like we didn't try! CSU spent three weeks in that cabin after the massacre and we have scoured the forests for two months between the attempts to find Hannah and Beth Washington four years ago and then Josh Washington two years ago. But the area is a nightmare, it's isolated, it's difficult to get there and navigate around, not to mention that it's really dangerous. According to an expert of the area, Hannah, Beth and Josh fell in a cave or a similar place, a cave that is probably hidden by snow most of the year. Samantha was lucky, when she escaped, that's it."

"And the crime scene?" asked Kate.

"That's another story, there was an abundance of forensic evidence, to the point we couldn't really deduce anything from it. You've seen the pictures, that place was a literal bloodbath. There was DNA everywhere, but every trace matched to the kids in the lodge. The killer covered his own tracks very well, it's as close as a perfect crime as I can tell."

"Shit…" Beckett cursed under her breath. "You've seen the video though. The killer is back there, taunting us."

She nodded. "Yes, I've seen it, but I'm going to be honest here. I've got the feeling it's only a trick to get away. Drag you all the way up here, away from your crime scene, in order to run away undisturbed."

"Yes, our Captain told us you thought that way," said Esposito. "But we've dealt with serial killers before. In our experience, when they taunt police, they do it for a reason, and that's never because they want to get away easily."

The Canadian cop shrugged. "Suit yourself. My boss asked me to cooperate with you, so here I am. What do you want to know?"

"Your impressions," replied Kate. "We studied the case from the reports on the way here. Now we want to know what you saw."

The cop shock her head. "Alright, but it will take some time."

She took them to the break room, on the other side of the corridor and had them sit down around the table there. She offered them coffee, which they accepted gladly, given the cold outside, then she started talking and explaining.

"You have to understand that when we got there, it was a couple of days after the massacre had taken place, and with the central heating turned all the way up the bodies weren't exactly in good conditions. There was blood everywhere, sometimes entrails and organs ripped off the bodies of the kids scattered around the area. SAW-style contraptions littered the house, bear traps and the like, sometimes stuff that came straight from a Spanish Inquisitor's worst nightmares. We had six mangled bodies, well on their way to decomposition, one missing and one traumatized in hospital, and the bodies we had sported the most terrified expression on their faces, like a mask of pure terror. The first thing I thought when I set foot in the scene, I knew it was going to be messy and impossible to solve. Two years later, I still have no idea how the hell all of that could have happened, and I get regular nightmares from it."

"Were there tracks, prints, something that could lead to the escape direction of the murderer?" asked Kate.

Detective Sanders shook her head. "Unfortunately, a heavy storm had been blowing for days, so every possible track was lost, submersed in snow. When we arrived, we couldn't even see Samantha's tracks from the house to the cablecar."

"Speaking of Samantha," intervened Castle. "We discovered that she was investigating on her own, but she seemed inclined to think there was a more… supernatural cause to everything that has happened. She was investigating the myth of the Wendigo."

Detective Sanders snorted in the cup of coffee she was taking a sip from. "God please no!" she snapped. "Not you too! She's been pestering us with the Wendigo thing, we also tried to please her by asking some First Nations people around that they all told us it was only a myth they use to scare children."

"Right…" mumbled Beckett. "What else can you tell us?"

"Not much. Only that if that killer is already up there, be ready for some weird shit going around. You can take one of our jeeps. It takes around four hours to get there from here. Then you have to take the cablecar, we'll give you the keys for that too. You're allowed to search the house and all the properties of the Washingtons, they have granted you the permission, but please, stay away from the sanatorium!" she said with some more emphasis.

"Why?" asked Ryan.

"Because that place is…" She ran her hands through her hair. "It's a run down place, it's dangerous, there are cave ins and who knows what kind of animal has taken shelter there. Could be wolves, badgers, pumas… elks or bears even. Stay away from that place! Even if you find a lead that brings you there, don't go there."

"You're not coming?"

"We can't. There's a storm coming up and the police force needs every cop here. That's why I advise you to make your investigation quick enough to come down next morning. If you get stuck there with the incoming storm, you will probably remain there days, a week maybe. Possible more."

They all exchanged a pretty worried look. "How long do we have?"

"Until dawn."

 **XXX**

Until dawn.

It meant having little more than ten hours, maybe twelve hours of time to investigate. Would it be enough?

Kate didn't think so.

As Esposito drove the borrowed jeep up the mountain road, she contemplated the view outside the slightly frosted windshield at her side. The mountains around them were all covered in a thick layer of snow, the whitened landscape was interrupted only by the dark branches of evergreen vegetation that covered the slopes. Every now and then, a road sign warned them of the wildlife possibly popping up on the road and to take care of them and stuff. Other than that, the long trip was long and silent. The radio signal got swallowed by the mountains pretty quickly and only the police radio signal got through.

They were all too nervous for small talk, even Castle seemed to be less talkative than normal. Between what they had seen in the file and the way Detective Sanders had spoken of the crime scene had left them all unnerved.

Sure, they all had their fair share of gore in the past, but in this case they were talking about a killer that had designed traps and contraptions to behead people, or eviscerate them. What if he had put up the same kind of stuff, while waiting for them?

Also, there was something wrong about that case. Not only because that serial killer seemed a more cruel than usual type of murderer, not even because he had taunted them to go there and catch him on his turf, but for the motive itself.

Yes, teens these days could be extremely cruel, be jerks and bully, but why target them? As a group, most of all. The file mentioned that they were all school friends, that they had been almost inseparable since first grade and the skiing and hiking vacations at the Washington's estate had been a staple ever since Bob Washington had purchased the land and built the cabin, they only skipped one year after his twin daughters had disappeared because they couldn't cope with the loss. In one interview Melinda Washington, Bob's wife, had mentioned that his son had insisted on going up there, to fight their sense of loss and grab their life back, to claim the place as a place with great memories, and not only the hanging ghost of his sisters' disappearance.

They were all up at the cabin only to have some fun. Only one of them came down and now she was dead too.

Out of boredom, she watched the video of the clown-masked man once again, looking for more clues but there wasn't much to work on. Tori had already done her magic on it, found where the video had been uploaded from, a free hotspot from the New York Public Library, the metadata had been carefully altered, only the model of the camera used to film it had been left in, a fairly expensive one. Specialists had worked on contrast and lighting trying to pull some details from the background, but it turned out to be a solid black backdrop or heavy curtain. The chair and the lightbulb were useless, the first because it turned out to be a mass produced model coming straight from IKEA and the second because it was only an old incandescent light bulb.

The video served only to cause them more and more stress about a case that was an evidence-deprived nightmare to begin with.

And then there was Samantha's disappeared laptop and the staggering amount of printed material she had about the Wendigo myth. She seemed very convinced she was on the right track.

Depression could play some nasty tricks on people's mind, despite all the medications. She was probably grasping at straws, trying to find a reason for the atrocious death of her friends, trying to overcome the survivor's guilt maybe.

"Here we are." Esposito's voice pulled her out of her train of thoughts. He parked the jeep right beside the cablecar station and the all stepped off to take in the scenery. Not that there was much to see actually, only an old wooden structure with a couple of windows and a steel door.

Ryan had the keys, so he sprinted towards the door to open it and start the cable car, so they could get to the lodge, while the others hurried to grab their backpacks and gears. Suddenly, Beckett was grateful that Castle had bought all that survival stuff, because things didn't look too good for them.

"Well," he started, hoisting the backpack on his shoulders. "If first impressions mean anything, by the cable car alone, we're in for some trouble."

"I've had a very bad feeling about this case from the very beginning Castle, it's not just first impression," replied Esposito.

"Guys, we don't have to settle here permanently so no matter how much this place creeps us out, we'll be here for roughly ten hours. Twelve tops. If Detective Sanders is right and the killer fooled us, we'll be out in no time," she added.

"Unless the killer is really here."

Esposito's words hung above them like the proverbial Sword Of Damocles and the thick silence was interrupted only when they heard the screeching of the cable car moving again after months, maybe years of inactivity.

Beckett sighed. "No backing out now…"


	4. Chapter 4

The ride on the cable car was more animated and interesting than the car ride. Castle had come prepared, not only with more survival gear than the three cops could imagine, but also had downloaded books about the geography, history and culture of the area, some were digital copies of the books Samantha had in her hotel room.

"Listen here: the property of the Washingtons was once a mining area and the it housed the location of a sanatorium for the tuberculosis. The coal mines remained open until the late fifties, after a huge cave in destroyed most of the tunnels and resulted in more than fifty casualties among the miners," he summarized the content of the page opened on his ebook reader. "Eleven of them were found thirty days after the cave in, weak and dehydrated, but alive."

"How the hell could they survive thirty days in those conditions?" asked Esposito, incredulous.

Castle flipped the pages. "Ah, here. According to their testimony, they survived drinking water from a spring that cracked open with the cave in. They don't say anything about food but…" His eyes bawled when he read the next few lines. "Shit this is disgusting… later when the rest of the bodies it turned out that they survived eating the flesh of those that had died."

Ryan made a disgusted smirk, while both Espo and Beckett gagged. "Fuck… that's…"

"Material for a horror flick," finished Castle. "But there's more. The eleven survivors were escorted to the sanatorium to be treated for dehydration and malnutrition, some developed the first symptoms of Creutzfeldt-Jakob's Disease. They probably contracted it eating the deads' brains or other tissues like that. God, it's… terrible."

Beckett nodded, covering her mouth with her hand. "Definitely not the best way to die, despite everything."

"This may explain while Detective Sanders told us not to go to the sanatorium," proposed Ryan. "It must have a bad name by now. The whole area must be dubbed something like _the cannibal mines_ or something!"

"Realtors must have had more than a few field days trying to sell the property," added Esposito. "And no wonder a horror movie director bought it!"

"I wouldn't be surprised if we discovered there's a Native graveyard somewhere around here."

"There is," stated Castle. "But the area is marked, enclosed and people of the local tribe take care of it. The book mentions Bob Washington too, says he was adamant that the graveyard would be kept as it was and maintained."

"Superstitious?" asked Esposito.

Castle shrugged his shoulders and looked up from the device in his hand. "Or maybe only very respectful? You know, years ago he declared he would never use myths, legends or entire cultures for shock value, you know, like in Poltergeist and stuff. He had no qualms with religious sects though."

"Religious sects some of the time are pretty bad on their own, using them for horror movies don't make them worse or whatever," said Kate. "You think that she was researching the Wendigo myth because of that story?"

Again, Castle shrugged. "Could be. I mean, this is the kind of scary story that creeps you out, for real. Not like those campfire tales that people tell at Halloween, easy forgettable. This happened for real, and if she was told this story around the time the massacre happened, she could have internalized it and started seeing it as a possible culprit, when she ran out of rational options.

A moment later, the cable car finally arrived at the station and the door opened, so they gathered their stuff and walked off. Ryan hurried to shut it down to conserve the energy.

"Alright, so, Detective Sanders said that from the station to the cabin it should take roughly five minutes following the path and keeping on the right at the crossroads." He said when he came out of the small building. "Shall we go?"

They started walking, but suddenly Beckett stopped and looked around. "Guys… look there." She pointed at the gate just a few steps ahead of them. It was closed shut, but not with a normal chain and lock, or with a padlock or anything you usefully adopt to close a gate. "Is that…"

"Intestines?" continued Esposito, walking closer to it? "Yes, it is. I guess deer intestines."

"Oh fuck…" Both Ryan and Castle cursed at the same time. "Really?"

The long cord-like material was covered in frosted blood and it made for a grim, ghastly but neatly tied bow, perfectly knotted to keep the gate closed. Kate gagged a little, but thankfully the cold had preserved it so it didn't smell. "That's sick."

Esposito pulled a short knife out of his pocket and cut it open. "I guess our questions about the killer being here were just answered. He's definitely here."

"Could be a deranged mountaineer, someone that wants to scare off intruders?"

"Doubt it." Espo pulled up a bloodied piece of paper from within the piece of intestine. He quickly unfolded it and showed it to them. With neat writing, despite some smudges, there was written a message for them.

" _Come and get me_." Kate read aloud. "Yes, I think our killer is right here. Be ready for anything and don't take anything for granted."

 **XXXXXXX**

They finally reached the cabin. The police seal was still in place and there were no traces of intrusion, recent or not. The snow from the recent snowfall had nearly completely melted on the unpaved path, but there was still an inch thick layer on the ground and no prints, except their own, were there. The cabin was huge, that was the first thing Castle noticed. From the outside, it looked like a modern version of the typical wooden cottage you would expect to find in the alps, but there were little details that made you realize quite quickly that it wasn't traditional at all. The design, the building quality, even the type of wood, not native of that region, were clear.

"Nice place," he commented.

"Yeah, if not for the massacre thing…" added Ryan. He had the key so he went ahead and, after having cut the police sigil, he opened the front door. The hinges squeaked when he pushed the heavy wooden door and the acute sound briefly echoed in the valley.

When they entered, they were engulfed by darkness, in stark contrast with the bright white light where they came from. With torches ready, they walked in and Ryan gently closed the door behind them.

The place had been thoroughly cleaned after the massacre and the strong, acrid smell of the detergents used to wash away blood and other gory materials still lingered in the foyer, as the place had never been visited after the cleaners had left.

"Well, what do we do now?" asked Esposito as he moved ahead of the small group and pointed the beam of light to the stairs.

"Well, I guess we should get the generators going," replied Ryan. "Detective Sanders said there's one in the basement that should be still working. With light, investigating should be easier."

"Alright, good idea," added Kate. "Let's go downstairs, together. This place creeps me out, I don't want us to get separated."

"Worried about the horror movie stereotype about getting separated?" he asked.

Beckett shrugged her shoulders and shook her head. "Not exactly. It's more of a tactical thing. We don't know the place and if we stay together, there's less chance we can get separated for whatever reason. And we have only one set of keys for the cable car, that's what worries me."

To him, those seemed both good reasons. While the place wasn't exactly hostile yet, it could turn into something completely different in a second or less.

As they looked for the basement staircase, Castle looked around. Inside, the cabin was a top notch modern house, with designer furniture - carefully chosen and arranged by a skilled interior designer, he could tell - tasteful ornaments and a wide open ceiling that gave the cabin a sense of space that few houses had. It seemed even bigger than it really was.

He huffed a breath and saw it smoke, so cold it was, and noticed that the vapour moved in a distinct direction. "Guys, I think the basement is down here." He pointed at a dark corner at their left, with his torch.

"How can you tell?" asked Espo.

"Look where your breath goes. There must be some kind of draft that way. Could be the basement."

As they went to check in that direction, he noticed that Kate was lingering behind a little, in front of a framed picture on the wall. "You alright?"

She nodded. "Yeah, sort of. It's just… it feels like defiling a temple, you know? Something terrible happened here, a whole family was torn to shreds and here we are, chasing the murderer. Never in my life I thought I'd feel so bad on a crime scene. It's unnerving."

He took a quick look at the picture she was observing. It showed five people, the Washington family in a family portrait that exuded happiness. He recognized Bob Washington from the photos and the interviews he had seen around, and noticed how much his son, Josh, resembled him without the glasses and the incipient balding. The twin daughters too, but they had more of their mother in them. They looked like the happiest family in the world in that picture, and now three out of five of them were supposed dead, their bodies probably abandoned somewhere on those mountains, covered in snow or maybe mangled by wildlife there.

It sucked.

"Hey, we're here to bring their murderer to justice. We know he's here and we'll catch him, we always do."

She chuckled. "Let's just hope it won't be like with Tyson."

His heart skipped a beat or two. "Don't mention him. Tyson is a schemer, this guy is just deranged. He tied a gate with a piece of gut for fuck's sake, he's out of his mind. He'll make a mistake somewhere down the line, and we're here to find that mistake."

"To put it in Nikki's words, we'll find the odd sock."

"Exactly. Now, let's find the basement, turn on the light and see if we find anything that will point us to the murderer, alright?"

It took them ten good minutes to turn on the generator. After two years, the diesel engine was completely gripped and it took the combined efforts of Esposito and Ryan, as they were more experte in handling that type of equipment, to give the generator some life, but when they finally managed to do so, they all felt a slight sense of relief to have at least that small but too often taken for granted commodity.

"Now we have light, what do we do?"

"We investigate, Castle," answered Esposito. "Sanders said we have to get at least off the mountain by dawn right? We better start now then. Where from?"

"From here," said Beckett. "We don't have much time and we don't have all the resources we have back in New York. We're on his turf, so we must familiarize with the territory, one step at a time. We start here."

"Alright Boss," called Ryan and then he turned and pushed the light switch so the neon lights above them would come to life.

As the light flickered to life, the dark basement showed it didn't have much in it except for the normal stuff you keep in a basement. Castle noticed that the place didn't smell like a surgery room and came to the conclusion that no one had died there.

He pulled off his thick insulated gloves and shivered when the cool air touched his slightly damp skin, then wore a pair of blue nitrile gloves so he could touch things without compromising possible evidence and opened a metal locker at his right. Inside, he found a bunch of utility items, a couple of brooms, a bucket and a scrubbing brush. There were old, opened bottles of detergents, rags and all the sorts. A normal utility closet.

Then he moved to a shelf and noticed a couple of things on it. First, a picture of the twin Washington girls in full hiking garb smiling at the camera. He turned it and found a quick message scribbled behind it. _Some things should never change once they are set - SquirrelMountaineer_

 _Which things?_ He wondered. He put the picture back down and let his eyes wander around, enough to notice a baseball bat leaning in a corner and a pair of large, rusty scissors. Everything looked like a normal basement, until Beckett got that attention when she found something interesting. "Why anyone would put a laptop down here?" she exclaimed as she took a MacBook out of a nook hidden behind a bunch of junk. "With the power cord too!"

"Could it be Sam's laptop?" proposed Ryan.

She nodded as she opened it and punched the power button. The screen came alive and showed a login screen, but the name of the account confirmed it was Samantha Moore's computer. "It has a password."

"Shit…" Esposito cursed loudly. "And now?"

"Try Wendigo," proposed Castle. "She was so obsessed with it wouldn't be strange if she had changed the password of her computer."

Kate tried, but it wasn't it. "We have two more options until it locks, but I doubt we'll find the password, we don't know much about Samantha to figure out how she set her password."

"Wait a moment, you said _set_ ," Castle snapped. "I found this photo…" He took a couple of steps closer to the shelf and grabbed the picture and showed the back to them. "This thing… it looks like a riddle. Could the password be SquirrelMountainer, with capital S and M?"

Beckett typed and the login was successful. "Great job Castle!" she cheered. They all observed the screen. It had a pretty picture as a wallpaper, of a mountain valley in spring or early summer, with slopes covered in bright green trees and the bluest sky Castle had ever seen in a picture. There were six icons on the desktop, one folder and five media files. Beckett opened the first picture and much to their collective horror, it was a photo of Samantha's body, taken with a cellphone camera given the crappy lighting of the compact flash. It was taken at night, when it was still dark.

"Okay, this guy is really insane." Castle was truly disgusted by the way that man was handling things.

"I fear we haven't seen the best of him," she continued as she clicked on another file, a video this time.

As the first one the killer had left in YouTube, the video had been shot in a dark room with a bare lightbulb as the sole source of light. The killer was sitting on the chair, his hands planted on his knees, wearing the creepy mask.

 _I see you found Sam's computer. I'm in awe. It's amazing that you flew all the way here just to find me. But you also managed to crack that little riddle I left you, good for you, you're a lot smarter than I thought. But since you are here, it seems like all the effort I put in the welcoming party. Feel free to roam around the property, but beware: I won't get let you catch me so easily. I hope you came prepared._

Then the video abruptly cut off.

The three detectives and the writer looked at each other until Ryan spoke. "To me, that sound like a threat."

Just as he finished that, there was a loud bang upstairs and those that were armed instantly grabbed their weapons. They were not alone.


	5. Chapter 5

Were they? Were they alone?

As Beckett led the group out of the basement, gun in one hand and torch in the other, both raised and ready, she wondered if the creepy story behind that lodge was getting to their head and numbing their judging abilities.

Before she took the last step on the stairs, she stuck her head out to take a look around. There was nothing out of place from the section of room she could see, but the loud bang they had heard repeated, louder this time. Esposito and Ryan looked at her and nodded, and she walked in the main corridor of the house. Her colleagues and Castle followed her, trying to be as silent as they could, on the squeaky floorboard.

"What the fuck is going on?" asked Kevin, pointing his gun towards the main entrance.

"You ask me?" replied Esposito. "There's something evil in this place."

"And now who's Castle junior?"

"Kev, he's right," she said. "There's something wrong here, I don't know if it's evil or simply in our heads, but there's something."

The noise banged again, the blunt sound of dry wood banging together, like a shutter moved by the strong wind. In the dimming light coming from outside, she could see there was some wind blowing, but not enough to make a shutter bang that way. They all turned towards the direction the sound came from and they saw a shutter opening slowly.

"There, it's just the wind blowing," said Castle. He moved towards the window and wrapped his fingers around the handle to open it and fix the loose shutter when he noticed a slightly mechanical noise. After he had opened the window, he looked up and he noticed a mechanical device attached to the shutter that slowly opened it and shut it abruptly so it would make some noise. "Wait a second… Look at this!" He grabbed the device and tugged hard, to dislodge it.

"What the hell is that?"

"No idea, I guess it's an elaborate trick to make us shit in our pants!" He turned it in his hands. "It had a timer, so it wouldn't turn on the moment we activated the generator."

"I don't understand." Kate was truly baffled by his discovery. "Why do something like that? I mean, it's a bad Halloween joke, nothing more than that!"

"We've got a trickster of a killer, I guess," proposed Castle. "He taunted us from the beginning after all, he's trying to fucking with us so we give up and don't catch him."

Javier ran a hand over his head as he holstered his gun. "Feels like Tyson again."

"No, this is worse." Ryan's voice faltered as he spoke those simple, but heavy words. "With Tyson, at least we have common ground, we know New York as much as he does, here? We're fishes out of water!"

"The metaphor works very well," added Castle. "But we should investigate, why don't you guys look around, while I search the computer? There were more files on the desktop that we didn't look at, I think they may be important."

Beckett nodded. "Good idea Castle. Come on, let's go and turn on the lights, he's right, we have work to do."

With the lights turned on, the room didn't look as creepy and oppressing as she had felt when they were exploring it with the bright but concentrated beams of their flashlights. The placements of the light sources was perfect, they bathed the vast room in a glow that made everything stand out. Only then she noticed that the large live in kitchen and the living room weren't separated by a wall, but it was a big room and the separation between the room was marked by the large staircase that led upstairs.

More horror movie posters were hanging on the walls, but also other types of work of art, like paintings and prints of photographs that seemed to depict the area around the cabin. There was a huge print of a satellite picture of the property, she could clearly see cable car station, the path that led to the cabin and all the landmarks they had been instructed to avoid, like the derelict sanatorium. As she examined it, she thought she could see even some of the mine shafts, or at least their entrances, hidden in the thick wood.

Then she noticed something, a drop of blood smeared on the print, right above the cabin. There were no smears, it hadn't been cleaned. The clean up team had probably missed it.

Had one of the kids been murdered in that spot? Instantly, she looked down and saw a large darker area on the hardwood floor, where the blood had seeped into the porous surface. The cleaners had done the best they could, but blood was almost impossible to wash.

It was like a punishment. Shed blood would always stain something, and that stain would remain, like a mark that would, often enough, lead to the murderer.

Mindful of Castle's finding with that picture in the basement that had led them to Sam's computer password, she took a closer look to the map, but found nothing, except for that drop of blood. What drew her eye was something on a bookshelf right beside the print. A crumpled then straightened out piece of paper, tucked beneath a framed picture of Josh, Hannah and Beth as children.

She picked it up. It looked like one of those notes teenagers passed around in class. She smiled when she remembered all the notes she and Maddie had passed around between themselves. The note read _Hannah, meet me in your room tonight at 2 AM, we need to talk._ It was signed _Mike_ , and after his name there were three little hearts scribbled in a horrendous way, one different from the other, not symmetrical in any way. The note was slightly jagged, typical of a male handwriting. Behind the note, there wasn't anything else.

Why was that note there? It had been placed, that was obvious, but why?

"Castle, you there?" she called.

"Yes, I'm here!" He was emerging from the basement right then, the laptop in his hands. "Wow, this place's so different with the lights turned on. You need anything?"

"Your memory and speedreading abilities. Who's Mike?" she asked.

"He was one of the victims of the massacre, two years ago. The jock of the group, from what I read, and kind of a heartbreaker. According to the reports I read, he was Emily's boyfriend when Hannah and Beth disappeared but two years later they had split up and he had brought his new girlfriend to the retreat, Jessica. Why?"

"Because I found a note for Hannah, I guess it comes from four years ago, signed from Mike. With hearts too."

"I smell a prank!" yelled Esposito from the kitchen, where he was inspecting a cupboard.

"What kind of prank?"

"The type of prank that leaves a girl heartbroken because the handsome jock she's admiring from afar lures her into thinking she has a chance with him and then other people pop up from hidden nooks of the room right when she's about to kiss him," explained Ryan.

"And these days, I wouldn't be surprised if they had been filming everything. Remember the case with the dead kid in Central Park and his friends that had filmed everything?" added Esposito. "I wouldn't be too surprised if it turns out Hannah and Beth Washington got lost in the woods because Hannah ran away after the prank and Beth followed her."

"Then why did the kids tell the police they got lost in a hiking accident?" asked Castle.

"To protect themselves," she prompted. "They didn't want to be accused of anything so they blamed it all to a hiking accident.

"And the killer murdered them all, Sam excluded, to take revenge on them? Sounds a little extreme, don't you think?" asked Castle, again.

"Murder is always extreme, even when it comes with self defence. Also it sounds like a really bad slasher movie synopsis. But right now this is speculation based on a crumpled note that was planted for us to find. Let's go on, I bet there's more for us to find."

With renewed fervor, with the last light of day seeping through the windows and the glowing artificial light inside, they doubled their efforts. They had roughly ten hours before they were required to go down the mountain and go back to town, unless they wanted to stuck up there with little food and not enough gas to keep the generators running in order to make the central heating on, thus avoiding becoming four human popsicles.

"Any luck with the computer?"

Castle shook his head. "Not much. The other files on the desktop were random images I couldn't really associate with any of the case, they were pictures taken in New York, she was probably sightseeing. The folder contains all her research for the murders though, even what looks like a diary…" He paused and scrolled down a text file cramped with lines. "More like a collage of recollections, nightmares… stuff like that."

"Her therapist probably prompted her to keep some sort of diary, to push her to accept what happened to her," said Beckett, leaning on the back of the couch so she could read the words on the screen. "She could be possibly suffering from survivor's guilt."

"Did your therapist asked you to do the same? The diary I mean," asked Castle, but not loud enough to be heard by Esposito and Ryan in the other room.

Beckett nodded, a grim smile on her face. "Yes he did, but I was stupid enough to disobey at first. I started keeping it only after the sniper case."

"Did that help?"

Again, she nodded. "Yes, a little. That, and you."

He kissed her cheek. "Happy to be of service."

"Hey, guys!" Esposito yelled, his voice echoed in a cramped space, which was strange. "I've found something interesting, and something that looks like blood!"

They sprinted to the kitchen and found Ryan on the doorstep of what looked like a now empty, oversized larder. There was a single lightbulb hanging from the ceiling, a chair and the tripod with a very expensive camera on it. "The set from the videos!"

"Yes, and a nice pool of blood." Espo pointed down to the floor where a pool of dark red liquid formed a nearly perfect circle, if it wasn't from a small slice cut off by what looked like gap of a trapdoor.

Castle walked in and kneeled close to the pool, then sniffed the air. "Nope, not blood. Fake blood." He dragged a gloved finger in it and despite the dark color that would indicate old, congealed blood, it was still fairly liquid. "Good quality, but fake. Looks like the type of fake blood they use in horror movies."

"It looks like another hint," she replied. "I would go and investigate down that hatch, but I want to check upstairs first."

"Ryan and I could go down," proposed Javier.

She shook her head. "No, we remain together. Trickster or not, this place is creepy as fuck. Let's go upstairs first, then if we can't find anything up there, we all go search down the hatch."

"Could it be another entrance to the basement?" asked Ryan.

"I doubt it," added Castle. "More probable, the whole cabin has been built on the mineshafts and this is the entrance to one of them. Before the Washingtons bought the land and built the place, this place was probably part of the mining network, I wouldn't be surprised if this hatch lead to a caved in tunnel or it was walled altogether."

"Well, one less place to look into. Come on, let's go upstairs."

There, they split up, one in each room, but still one shout away from one another. Beckett even gave Castle her spare gun, just in case.

She took the last room on the left, which apparently had belonged to Josh Washington. The bed was made, ready to be used. There was a large desk in the corner of the room, with books and framed photos scattered on it. There was also the power cord of a laptop, unplugged from the outlet and abandoned without its corresponding computer in a corner of the surface. On the bedside table, a lamp and a book about digital movie editing. It was well worn and slightly damaged, a sign it had been studied multiple times.

Curious, Beckett checked the rest of the books in the room and noticed that most of them were about cinema, from its history to special effects, direction theory, editing and some books on screenwriting and casting too. The boy wanted to follow his father's footsteps, that was clear, but it was strange to find all those books in the vacation home. Why not keeping them always with him?

The only reason she found was that he was so rich he could afford double copies of all those books, most of them were actually university textbooks and cost a lot but with daddy's money, it wasn't an issue at all for him.

All in all, it was the bedroom of a normal college boy with a passion. Only it wasn't football or basketball or videogames, but cinema.

She searched every nook, ever corner and even thought about checking every book for more hidden notes, but there was no reason as there were no dust marks that would point out to tomes being moved around, so she only checked the drawers and the wardrobe. In it there was a decent array of clothes for both summer and winter and in between, shoes and boots, a couple of ski jackets. The drawers were more interesting though. The one embedded in the desk contained some stationery, a calculator, a scrapbook with tons of ideas for horror movies scribbled on it, even designs for practical special effects like automated dummies that would move like humans, mimicking various movements, a machine that would cut a mannequin in half, with realistic guts and blood spilling out.

She chuckled, thinking of Zalman Drake. Josh had the same inspiration, the same inclination for engineering. He might have not become a director, but he would have been a great special effects technician. Who knew, maybe one day one of those machines would have granted him an Oscar.

The bedside table drawer was even more interesting.

Inside, she found more normal stuff for a teen of Josh's age, included an unopened pack of condoms, but most of all, there was a Moleskin notepad that looked more like a diary than another scrapbook. As she flipped through the pages, not really caring what was written in them, she noticed that the writing became more jagged as time went by, to the point that some pages contained only zig zagged doodles and little words, and those few words were kind of scary.

There was a page, dated only a month before the massacre, completely filled with the same three words line. _They killed them_.

"Uh, guys!" she called, loudly. "I fear Espo's theory about the prank and the cover up is true!"

The three men appeared in the doorstep. "Really?"

Flipping back through Josh's diary to the date of Hannah and Beth's disappearance, four years prior, she found a page, dated about a week and half after his sisters' vanishing, that stated it clearly. " _It was only a prank,_ " she read aloud." _They said it was only a prank, that they didn't mean anything wrong. They didn't expect Hannah would react that way, they never thought she would run in the woods in the middle of the night during a snowstorm. Or that Beth would follow her. And they never came back. My sisters are dead, all for a prank…"_

"Fuck, I was right!" exclaimed Espo. "But then… where the fuck is Josh?"

"Could he be our killer?" suggested Castle. "He had a psychotic break, planned his revenge and executed it, but then Sam escaped, so he disappeared, made it look like he had escaped too but got lost in the woods. Then he tracked Sam, lured her to New York and killed her too."

"But how, Castle? How did he lure Sam there?" asked Ryan.

"There are conversations saved on Sam's computer, between her and a guy on a forum about the paranormal, they talked a lot about the myth of the Wendigo. He said there were experts in New York, books she could borrow in public libraries there," explained Castle. "I didn't read everything, but she had saved all their conversations. He seemed to know how to talk to her, like she knew her, personally. It could have been Josh all along."

"So, no serial killer? Just a guy that had a psychotic break?" questioned Esposito.

"Could be. Did you find anything in the rooms?" she asked. They shook their heads. "Alright, let's see what's down that hatch. The fake blood must be some kind of sign, right?"

So they walked downstairs and into the larder turned set. Esposito pulled the handle of the hatch and opened it. A gust of icy air invested them and made the temperature inside the already cold room sensibly drop. At least they had kept their heavy jackets on.

"Alright," she started. "Castle and I go in first."

"Why?"

"Because I say so, Kev. Bottlenecks like this can be deadly. We need to keep the teams together and while we work exceptionally good even mixed up, I'd prefer you and Espo remain together. Got it?" She threw her backpack down then, holding tightly on the rungs of the stairs embedded in the wall, she descended in the dark hole. The moment she set foot on the floor, she turned on the flashlight and looked around. It was a dark corridor, dug in the stone. Castle was right, it was an old corridor that connected what was probably a communal house to the mineshafts, where the real work would be done. "Alright Castle, come down!"

He dropped his backpack and repeated her actions. Once he was on solid ground, he looked up at the two detectives, torch in hand. "Looks like…"

The rest of his sentence was swallowed by the stridor of a sliding trap door that snapped and closed the hatch. Before she could react, Castle was already back on the stairs, torch wedged between his teeth, trying to open the door. "Fuck… it's sealed shut!"

"What the fuck is going on?" came the muffled voice of Esposito from the other side.

"No idea!" shouted Castle. "It must be Josh, he planned this all along!"

Beckett looked around, but couldn't see an end to the corridor that started there. "We have to find a way out!" she shouted too. "The corridor here goes on for a while, we'll look for the exit!"

"Alright!" That was Ryan. "You have a map of the area?"

"Yes, I have one!" Castle yelled at the top of his lungs.

"Come back safe then! We'll go look through the rest of the house for that masked son of a bitch!"

"We'll be back as soon as we can!"

Castle jumped off the stairs and looked at her, his eyes filled with uncertainty and his face pale as a ghost in the cold white light of their torches. "I have a bad feeling about this."

"Yeah, me too. And you know what? I have the feeling this corridor will lead us straight to the sanatorium."

"That's where he wants us," he said, as he wore his thick gloves again. "He wants us scared, constantly on edge. He knows the local police told us to stay away from that place, he knows we were told, or we learned about the cannibals. This is his playfield, the horror and the gore. Josh wants us scared."

"Yes, definitely. But he doesn't know we found out his game. He has no idea we know it's him, that we connected the dots he left behind, not yet. He underestimated us, left all those evidence in plain sight, probably thinking we wouldn't be good enough to outsmart him. And that's what we have to do now. It's Tyson all over again, but this guy is psychotic, he has delusions we are here to smash, alright? We're going back in one piece from this!"

"Oh believe me, I know. We only have to assume that every step we take we might trigger another boobie trap, like in The Goonies!"

"Oh yes, only this time it's not a pirate that set the traps, but Michael Myers," she added with a chuckle. Come on Castle, let's find the exit!"


	6. Chapter 6

The underground corridor seemed endless, the beam of light from their torches swallowed by the darkness ahead of them. With their backpacks on their shoulders, torches in one hand and gun in the other, they walked, slowly, careful not to trigger any boobie traps Josh might have set for them, on the way.

"I wonder why he has made all the hints so obvious," whispered Castle at some point. "I mean, the diary becoming increasingly deranged, the note from Mike, the blood down the hatch, it all looks so… blatant!"

"You know, nine times out of ten, serial killers believe they're smarter than the cops unleashed to catch them. I guess Josh doesn't fall in that one out of ten," she replied. "He probably underestimated us and our ability to connect the dots."

"Or he had no idea the NYPD had Richard Castle at their service!" he chuckled. "And Richard Castle loves horror movies, and this guy grew up with horror and slasher, I can recognize the plot of one when I see it."

"You know that I watch horror movies too, and that I could have followed the clues myself?" inquired Kate.

"Oh I know perfectly well you love horror movies, I wasn't the one that dragged us down to the theater to see The Cabin In The Woods on the day it came out!"

"Come on Castle, that one is more a comedy than a horror!"

"Yes, and the combination worked perf…" He stopped in his tracks and pointed his flashlight to the wall at his left. "Hey, look here!"

There was a large brass plaque, with thick letters in bas-relief. It commemorated the opening of the mining complex and marked the very first shaft that was excavated, in 1851.

"Looks like you were right, Castle. I wonder what was built in place of the cabin, when the mines were open."

He shrugged his shoulders, but beneath the thick ski jacket and the heavy backpack he was carrying, she could barely notice it. "The barracks?" he proposed. "Or and administrative building, maybe? Or both. As much as I did research in a lot of different fields, coal mines aren't among them."

"I guess it doesn't matter anymore, considering it was demolished to make room for that lodge. By the way, how's your father's cabin?"

She snorted, trying to suppress a laugh. "Compared to that mansion, it's more like the toolshed," she explained. "On more normal means of comparison, it's a very classic mountain cabin, two floors, two bedrooms upstairs, one large room downstairs that serves both as kitchen and living room. It's simple, but cozy and warm."

"Next time you have a couple of days free, would you like to go there and erase the memories of this place?"

"Why not? Sounds like a good idea. It's great in this season. Come, let's go one. Let's see where this hallway leads, alright?"

In the end, the corridor turned out to be completely safe, no traps or tricks planted anywhere. Probably Josh hadn't found any place to hide, as the walls were smooth and there weren't nooks or other places to hide contraptions or stuff like that. The first shaft ever dug had been transformed in a service corridor to move miners back and forth, and about fifteen minutes since they had started walking they found themselves in front of a fork in the hallway. One way was walled, while the other, the path on the left, seemed to continue without issues. Out of curiosity, Kate checked the wall that blocked the path. It looked old and raised in haste, the bricks were damp and stained by mold and humidity. "You think they walled this path when they closed the mines, after the cannibalism case?" she asked him, running her torch all over the wall. There were cracks between the bricks, the craftsmanship was lacking and sticking the torch in one of the gaps she could see beyond the wall. "Uh, there's a lot of stuff behind this wall! Pickaxes, spades, gas masks hanging from the walls. It looks like a huge toolshed!"

She heard Castle walking back behind her. "It probably was, Kate. The original wall has a door, that's the latest part that was closed up. Here, you see?" He pointed that a faint but visible line at her side. "I guess this was the old access to the mine and was closed when the mines were. This path though," he pointed at the open one. "The only place it could lead is the sanatorium."

He pulled a folded map out of the back pocket of his pants and checked it. "Alright, if my sense of orientation isn't completely busted, we're heading here." He pressed his finger just below the marker of the old sanatorium. "But I have no idea if the hallway goes straight up, or if it turns around somewhere down the road and changes direction."

"Well, I guess we have to walk there to know."

In truth, they had no desire to walk anywhere but out of that damn hallway, but they had no choice. Unless Ryan and Esposito found a way to open the hatch, but there wasn't much hope about that. On the other side of the tunnel, there was a heavy wooden door, left ajar. A gust of cold air flowed in towards them. With the sun disappeared behind the mountains, the temperature had dropped ten good degrees. Kate shivered when she wrapped her ungloved hand around the door to pull it open.

"How long until dawn?" she asked.

"Nine hours and half, roughly. I wonder how long it will take us to go back to the lodge, in the dark and without the underground express tunnel."

"You want to go back right away? I thought you'd like to investigate a sanatorium with a creepy history on its back."

Castle nodded, visibly. "In other circumstances, without a deranged teen that really wants to emulate Michael Myers, I wouldn't mind. Better, I would be eager to explore every nook of it. With Josh running around? Nope, thank you."

"Can't say I disagree." And once the door was fully open, she felt the sudden urge to close it and barricade in the tunnel. In front of them they could see the battered, unattended lobby of the sanatorium. The ceiling had half crumbled over and the whole area looked unstable to say the least, not to mention the dust and the debris that made everything look like a sandstorm had created the havoc in front of them.

"And here I thought the cabin was creepy…" she muttered.

"This isn't creepy, this is terrifying. You're aware the Josh is probably hiding somewhere around here?"

"Yes, but I'm trying not to think about it. I bet this was his escape route, two years ago. He got out of the cabin, into the woods, down the mountain and back into civilization where he followed the case and stalked Sam until he convinced her to move to New York to speak with that professor at Columbia."

Castle took a step outside and carefully inspected the floor right outside the door, checking for boobietraps. "He probably stacked supplies for months, in order to being able to survive here. Detective Sanders told us they never checked the sanatorium because it's unstable and can crumble down anytime right? He knew they would never look for him here, that they'd search the woods because who in the right state of mind would stay here, no matter how desperate, so he camped up here for a while."

Careful not to stumble or trigger anything, Beckett moved inside the lobby too. "Crazy as it sounds, I think you're right. You think he rigged his own hideout?"

"Stupid, but he could have. This guy isn't exactly right in the head, is he?"

"Castle, depression and psychosis shouldn't be ridiculed like that. It's not a matter of being right in the head, it's a matter of mental health, and this guy evidently wasn't treated the right way. He wasn't probably diagnosed at all, if he got to this point!"

"Right, I'm sorry, it was stupid, I shouldn't have said that. Come on, let's see what we can find here."

What they found was a locked front door. Their preferred way out was a huge steel-reinforced wooden door that was locked and nailed shut. Even with a crowbar they had no chance to move that mammoth of a door. The hinges were probably frozen solid and rust covered every inch of the plaque of the lock. They wondered, even if they had the key, if it would be useful, or if the cylinders had turned to dust, after decades of neglect, and if they were kept together only by the ice.

They were forced to wander around the sanatorium longer than they had thought. The dark, moldy corridors seemed to close on them, pools of stagnant water made their steps resonate with loud splashes, the particulate floating in the air made the beams of light coming from their torches look like ghosts. Each shadow moving with the wind outside, each noise coming from the mountain behind the building made them flinch and pushed them more on edge than a moment before.

They walked around, mindful of every step they took. They found rooms that once housed patients recovering from tuberculosis, ancient machinery they had no idea what they were for, old rusty bed structures and wheelchairs abandoned around. Castle even dared to snoop around one of the offices and in the shelves. All the documents were still there, even those regarding the cannibals.

"Hey Beckett, look here. They still have all the documents! There's the full report of the eleven cannibals!"

"They didn't seize them when they closed this place?" she asked, checking the windows to see if they would budge. They were nailed shut too, with thick boards keeping light and intruders outside.

"Apparently they didn't. Shit, this is even worse than what I read in the book! They were aggressive and even assaulted one of the nurses once the disease set in and they tried to bite her. Shit, this place is… I don't even know what to say, if we weren't trapped in here, I'd say it's the best escape room ever!"

"I would agree too, if we weren't trapped here, if I wasn't freezing and if I wasn't starving. You have anything to eat in your backpack?"

"Oh, I stuffed yours as well. There's beef jerky, granola bars, a couple of chocolate bars… the usual. We can stop and eat, we still have nearly eight full hours to get back to the cabin and down the mountain."

She shook her head. "Nah, not now. Once we're back to the cabin, yes, but now? We can't stop to eat. Or read fifty years old medical documents."

Their search for an exit brought them to the morgue. A room that usually is creepy on its own, but what they found in that particular morgue scared the shit out of them.

"Is that… what I think it is?" Rick's voice was strangled and muffled.

Kate shivered at the sight in front of them. Two mummies, for lack of a better word, dressed in girly winter clothes, lay on two of the slabs of the unused refrigerating room, adorned with with looked like an attempt at making an altar for them. There were candle stumps, dried plants and mountain flowers and other forms of idols all around the slabs, surrounding the two bodies.

"Oh fuck he found their bodies!" she gasped.

"And he dragged them here, in his hideout, to take care of them in death like he wasn't able to do when they were alive."

She swallowed the lump that had formed in her throat. "Well Castle, meet Hannah and Beth Washington."


End file.
